Twenty-nine point eight seconds remained on the living clock burning inside Arthur Vance’s frontal lobe.
[00:29.8]
[00:28.4]
Arthur hit the floor of the smoking crater with both knees, the air-powered dampers in his combat trousers hissing wildly as they absorbed the sixty-foot drop. He didn’t let the impact arrest his forward driving force. In Level 5 Pentagonal Convergence Overdrive, his human reflexes were augmented by Vesper’s zero-drag joint articulation and Grimm’s explosive launch power. As his boots skidded across the slick, melted residue of cut blood-vessel channels, Arthur drove his entire body forward.
Directly in front of him, pinned beneath Grimm’s crushing eighteen-thousand-pound jaw vice, lay the deep body cleft.
It was the interfacial boundary where the parasite’s thirty-meter void core anchored into the sagittal sinus of the Archaic World-Serpent World-serpent. To an untrained eye, it looked like a tangled mass of stone-hard black wood and pulsing purple veins fused into living jade bone. To Arthur, who had performed hundreds of delicate tumor resections on complex mammalian and draconic specimens across two lifetimes, it was a classic foreign body impaction. Complicated by ten million years of stringy turning to stone.
The core was thirty meters wide and reached eighteen meters deep into the skull bone. If he tried to pry the core out with clockwork force alone, the empty pocket adhesion would rip the dragon’s underlying meninges to shreds, inducing fatal bleeding inside the skull before the parasite was even clear of the skull.
